From One to Two: Can Visual Feedback Improve the Light Touch Effects on Postural Sway?

Abstract

The postural control is improved by implicit somatosensory information from lightly touching a rigid bar or explicit visual information about the postural sway. Whether these two additional sources provided at the same time further reduce the postural sway is still unknown. Participants stood on a force plate as quiet as possible lightly touching the bar while received or not visual feedback of the center of pressure position on a monitor screen. Postural sway reduced similarly with the light touch regardless of the additional visual feedback. The findings suggested that providing explicit visual feedback of the center of pressure does not increase the light touch effects on the postural sway. The importance of the implicit somatosensory information on postural control is discussed.

Keywords:

• explicit and implicit information
• visual cues
• postural control
• somatosensory information
• sensory reweight

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a FAPESP/Brazil grant (#2010/15360-4) to Freitas. Garbus and Prado-Rico are thankful to CAPES/Brazil for their scholarship. Freitas is also thankful to CNPq support.